World War Two
The Emperor of Atlantis, Arcola TheatreWednesday, 17 August 2011
We critics often find ourselves "embarrassed by historical facts", as Craig Raine once put it. Raine was trying to explain why so many people still value Wilfred Owen's poetry - to him, the most overrated corpus of the 20th century. "[Owen's]... Read more... |
DVD: Colossal YouthTuesday, 16 August 2011
Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth (2006) is a shadowy study in exile, set in and starring a Lisbon neighbourhood of Cape Verdean migrant workers. Ventura is the damaged, dignified old man who fills nearly every scene. With a lurching... Read more... |
Sarah's KeyTuesday, 02 August 2011
History rears its harrowing head in Sarah's Key, a sometimes galumphing film that lingers in the mind not least because of the terrible tale it has to tell. Reminding us that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren't any one country's exclusive... Read more... |
Captain America: The First AvengerTuesday, 26 July 2011
Already shouldering the new Harry Potter off the top of the US box-office charts, this latest arrival from Marvel Studios harks back to a simpler America where the hero wraps himself in the stars and stripes and the bad guys speak with ridiculous... Read more... |
Regional TV: Life Through a Local Lens/ Britain Through a Lens - The Documentary Film Mob, BBC FourThursday, 21 July 2011
I was once shown around Anglia TV’s studios by the bloke who used to say, "And now, from Norwich - the quiz of the week!” by way of introduction to the immortal Sale of the Century. A tremendous thrill, as you can imagine. It all came back to me... Read more... |
DVD: Went the Day Well?Wednesday, 13 July 2011
It’s 69 years since Went the Day Well? was released, but its moments of brutality still have the power to shock. It’s not so much the actual violence that’s shocking; when people die (and quite a lot do die), there’s precious little blood or gore... Read more... |
The Night Watch, BBC TwoTuesday, 12 July 2011
Sarah Waters’s highly praised novels have marched from the page to the screen with regimental regularity and no apparent sacrifice in quality. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, with their big Victorian brushstrokes, were built for television no... Read more... |
Art Gallery: The Worlds of Mervyn PeakeTuesday, 05 July 2011
Best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968 and whose centenary is celebrated this year, was also an artist, an illustrator and a poet. As well as illustrating his own fiction (images 5-9), some of his finest drawings were... Read more... |
Secret War, YesterdayMonday, 20 June 2011
The dramatic music, blue-tinged reconstructions and menacing voiceover all suggested that we should be sceptical of World War Two heroine Vera Atkins. The title of the programme indeed, Secret War: The Spymistress and the French Fiasco, told us... Read more... |
Chicken Soup With Barley, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 08 June 2011
"Love comes now. You have to start with love," urges Sarah Kahn (Samantha Spiro) early in Chicken Soup With Barley, and it's inconceivable that Dominic Cooke's knockout production of Arnold Wesker's 1958 play could have sprung from any other... Read more... |
DVD: Speer and Hitler: The Devil's ArchitectMonday, 06 June 2011
Albert Speer was Hitler’s most high-ranking war minister, but just how much was he complicit in Nazi atrocities? Thirty years after his death, and 16 after Gitta Sereny’s controversial biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Speer remains a... Read more... |
Prince Philip at 90, ITV1Tuesday, 24 May 2011
David Frost and Richard Nixon. Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter. Parky and Ali. The list of seminal TV interviews is a relatively short one, and it's not about to get any longer. Alan Titchmarsh’s hopelessly mismatched bout with Prince Philip saw the... Read more... |
